]]>Just months after the world’s largest solar panel farm, called Topaz, was turned on outside of San Luis Obispo, Calif., on Monday a similarly-large solar panel farm is being officially dedicated in Riverside County. The solar farm is called Desert Sunlight, and it — like Topaz — has enough capacity for 550 MW, and can produce enough solar electricity for 160,000 homes.

The Topaz solar farm.

Desert Sunlight, which was was quietly finished in mid-January, was installed on land managed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, and, like Topaz, is using solar panels from First Solar. NextEra Energy, GE Energy Financial Services and Sumitomo Corporation of America own Desert Sunlight and the project used guarantees from the U.S. government to back $1.4 billion in loans.

The U.S. government’s loan program took the opportunity of the Desert Sunlight dedication to tout how its loan guarantees helped spur the market for utility scale solar in the Southwest of the U.S. A release notes: “LPO helped finance the first five utility-scale PV projects larger than 100 MW in the U.S. With Desert Sunlight now fully operational, all five projects are online, generating clean electricity and repaying loans.”

To read more about why these huge solar panel farms are being built and how they work check out:

]]>A year after raising a $100 million financing round, smart window startup View (formerly called Soladigm) is raising another $75 million round, and has closed on about $29 million of the round, according to a filing with the SEC. View makes dynamic windows, also called “electrochromic windows,” which use low-voltage electrical current to reflect or absorb light, tinting or untinting the window on demand.

If it closes the round, View will have raised more than $375 million over its eight year lifetime from investors including private equity firm Madrone Capital Partners (associated with the Walton family, the heirs to the Walmart fortune), Khosla Ventures, GE, Corning, DBL Investors, and the Westly Group. Making glass, and the IT needed to tint the glass, is an expensive proposition, but View can lower its production costs as it scales up manufacturing.

View spent 2014 working on growing production at its factory in Mississippi, as well as sales, distribution and marketing. At the beginning of 2014, View was shipping glass that was 50 square feet in size, and the company had installed about 50 projects across North America including a 27,000 square foot project at a hospital in Toronto, and a 37,000 square foot project at a tech center in Louisiana.

View’s windows of course are more expensive to buy than regular windows or cheap shading options like blinds. But View’s customers (premium hotels, corporate offices, etc.) are buying them both to be early adopters of cool tech, but also to reduce energy use and energy costs associated with air conditioning and heating. The coloring effect of View’s window can cool or warm a room, and can cut 20 percent off the costs of heating and cooling, 20 percent off of lighting, and can reduce peak load (electricity at peak times of use) by 25 percent.

View’s window manufacturing process is similar to one that’s used in the semiconductor industry, but using large glass pieces. The windows are made by depositing a 1 micrometer thick layer of tungsten oxide onto a pane of glass, and then that layer is sandwiched by another pane of glass. The original core technology came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. View also makes the controller system, and the software and apps that can control the window tint from an iPhone.

]]>A huge solar panel farm is set to go under construction in Setouchi, Japan in November thanks to recently closed funding from GE, which owns a 60 percent stake in the project, as well as Kuni Umi Asset Management and Toyo Engineering Corporation. The farm will cost $1.1 billion to build, and the group just closed a $867 million loan from Japanese banks, which is the largest amount of debt raised for a clean power project in Japan to date, according to GE.

The solar panel farm will stretch across 1,210 acres, and will cover a former salt field. When done, the project is supposed to provide solar power starting in the second quarter of 2019 and sell power to Chugoku Electric Power Company over a 20-year contract. Toyo Engineering and Shimizu Corporation will build the plant and a company called Chudenko Corporation will operate and maintain it.

Solar panel, Image courtesy of Andreas Demmelbauer

Japan has been aggressively building solar projects in the wake of the decision to dismantle its nuclear plants following the Fukushima disaster. Over the past two years Japan has installed close to 11 GW of solar power projects, and has implemented an incentive program to encourage investment in renewables. Japan has over 71 GW of clean energy projects approved, and 96 percent of those are solar, according to Bloomberg.

Japan already had a long history in the solar industry before it implemented its incentive program. It has some of the largest solar panel makers in the world, including Panasonic, Sharp and Solar Frontier (part of Showa Shell). Here’s a list of some of the other solar projects that have been built in Japan in recent years.

]]>At long last Wink is showing off its planned wall-based home control device — a light switch and touchscreen combo that will retail for $300. The device, which was rumored earlier this year, will let consumers who have Wink home automation systems control their homes from a wall panel and the two adjacent light switches. I like the idea since it lets people who don’t have a phone (guests, children) manage the home.

The device is available for pre-order on Amazon and will hit Home Depot shelves in time for the holidays (the site says it ships around Thanksgiving). It also will coincide with an app update and new partners for Wink, including Nest. According to the Wink press release over 100 devices from 15 brands now work with the Wink system. That’s a decent roster of devices, although the Wink platform itself has some growing to do before I recommend it to my non–tech-savvy friends.

In my tests I found the hardware difficult to work with, but the software is promising. The Relay wall switch will replace an existing light switch in the home, and adds a variety of sensors such as temperature, humidity, proximity and sound. It also promises to one day function as an intercom thanks to its speakers and microphone. Wink recommends having a professional install the switch.

A possible trend in the home automation space: Touchscreens deployed around the house to act as an alternative to phones, with this switch and the Logitech Harmony remote that contains a 2.5-inch capacitive touchscreen to run the smartphone app. I’m excited about using cast-off handsets and tablets as remotes for my home automation system, scattered around the house or in the guest room, so it stands to reason others might be excited about that opportunity as well. Not everyone carries their smart hone around in their pocket all the time.

]]>A new generation of medical equipment is helping GE continue bragging about its industrial internet progress. It includes a CT scanner that can be linked to a heart monitor to snap images at the precise moment the patient’s heart is still, while also tracking vitals, playing music and linking as needed to other pieces of equipment might make sense. Coordinating this level of interaction between devices in real-time is no small feat, which is why it’s worth knowing about Real-Time Innovations Inc., or RTI, the company that makes those data flows possible.

RTI is a 23-year-old company based in Sunnyvale, California, that is using the open source DDS messaging protocol to send data between machines. Its Connext software is built around the protocol, and is deployed on everything from naval carriers to underground mines. It even is used in Canada’s air traffic control system and at NASA. And now that the internet of things is making messaging and sending data in real time so much more important, RTI CEO Stan Schneider is ready to take advantage of his company’s history and software expertise.

In February, the company launched a version of its software that would support more protocols that might be used by connected devices and sensors and also added support for more devices messaging. As Schneider noted in an interview, in a medical setting a hospital might need to coordinate data between 1,000 beds with 100 separate sensors sending information. That’s a lot of coordination, but he believes the Data Distribution Service (DDS) protocol RTI is betting on is best able to handle that.

Alternative protocols that are also vying to carry data traffic for the internet of things are MQTT, XMPP (Jabber) and the AMQP server-to-server messaging protocol.

Based on GE Healthcare choosing RTI as the software provider inside its next generation of connected medical devices, RTI, or perhaps the DDS protocol, is apparently doing something right. RTI is also part of the Industrial Internet Consortium, the group founded by GE, Intel, Cisco, IBM and AT&T to build out reference architectures for the industrial internet, so it’s possible that DDS might find a home there for medical settings. Other companies such as PrismTech, Object Computing Inc. and others also build software around DDS as a sort of middleware platform to connect devices.

Schneider explained that in many industrial settings the device data stays in a mesh network between devices as opposed to going back up to the cloud. When you’re matching the spin of a CT scan to a heartbeat, there’s not a lot of room for latency. The same goes for performing robotic surgery. So while RTI’s software does support sending data back to the cloud, for now Schneider is skeptical how large a role it will play in the industrial internet.

]]>I spend way too much time attaching devices to my home network, and on this week’s podcast I did a cursory review of the Wink home hub, that’s came out earlier this month at Home Depot and Amazon stores (a more detailed Wink review can be found here). I liked the software, but had a lot of trouble with attaching devices, so I didn’t find it much better than the existing products out there.

However, I also brought Stephen Sorkin of Splunk on the show. Sorkin is notable because he’s spent a few thousand dollars on electricity tracking devices, home weather stations and gear to hack his pool data. As an employee of a data analytics company, you’d expect his attachment to open data for the home, but he goes above and beyond when it comes to grabbing between 175 MB and 200 MB of data each day and then trying to use that data to influence everything from his new appliance purchases to his watering schedule. Listen up.

]]>PTC, a company better known for its product development (CAD), product data management (PLM) and service management software for manufacturing firms is now getting hot and heavy with the industrial internet. On Wednesday it said it had agreed to purchase Axeda, a company that has been providing cloud services and expertise to big name brands as they try to add connectivity to their product, for $170 million in cash. The deal is expected to add $25 million to $30 million of revenue in the company’s fiscal 2015 beginning October 2014. The deal should close by Sept. 30 of this year.

Late last year, PTC purchased ThingWorx which also offered back-end cloud services and expertise. Essentially, while there are plenty of hot new startups attacking this space such as Ayla Networks, PTC is going after companies that have been around for much longer. For example, Axeda was founded in 2000, while ThingWorx has been around since 2009.

Both are more expert in the older M2M world that relied on cellular connectivity, and both quickly glommed onto the promise that ubiquitous cell phones and cheaper radio technologies could offer in terms of making connected devices more accessible to more devices and places. Now it’s clear that PTC sees an opportunity, and is diving in to secure what it thinks the future is for its manufacturing clients. In that it will compete with GE, Cisco and other large tech and industrial firms who also see a huge opportunity.

]]>GE is using an innovation for manufacturing fuel cell technology as the backbone to launch an independent startup within the conglomerate, the head of the group, Johanna Wellington, told me in an interview on Monday. The 17-person GE team is now in the process of working on scaling up the fuel cell tech as well as the pilot production line, and plans to commercialize the product as early as 2017.

Fuel cells are big boxes that can generate energy through a chemical reaction. They operate a bit like a battery but instead of storing energy, they actually create energy through a reaction oftentimes using hydrogen and oxygen as a fuel source. GE has been working on fuel cell technology for decades but a few years ago its researchers discovered a new way to manufacture a key piece of the fuel cell.

Fuel cell boxes are made of stacks of metal plates that are coated in a catalyst material that triggers the energy-generating reaction. Oxygen and hydrogen flow over the stacks and the catalyst. GE’s fuel cells use a ceramic combination for the coating. Usually companies sinter these layers onto a metal sheet to make the stacks, but GE’s innovation is that it figured out a low cost way to spray the ceramic layers onto the stacks.

Image courtesy of GE

The spray technique was a technology that GE was using for coatings for jet engines. It’s an additive process that deposits three layers of the coating onto a metal sheet that makes up the stacks. Wellington tells me the spray method lowers the cost of making the fuel cell significantly, but GE declined comment on how much the product would cost when it’s available commercially.

When it eventually becomes a product, the fuel cell will actually be paired with a Jenbacher engine to make a hybrid fuel cell. The engine helps the fuel cell operate much more efficiently, and Wellington tells me that GE’s hybrid fuel cell will be 65 percent efficient. The idea is that retail operations and industrial customers — like a data center operator — would want to use this type of distributed clean power. Apple and other data center companies have bought fuel cells from Bloom Energy for this type of use.

GE thinks the fuel cell hybrid device is important enough to get its own separate company working on it. Wellington says that the startup model is an opportunity for GE to have the team work solely on the product and be able to operate quickly and nimbly. It’s a new business model for GE and it’s funded by GE’s venture arm GE Ventures. Wellington declined to disclose the amount of funds supplied to the startup. GE is hiring at its fuel cell startup in New York, and plans to grow to 30 people eventually.

]]>Buying a fitness tracker is easy compared to figuring out how to find an accurate caloric content of your food, but that didn’t stop General Electric Researcher Matt Webster from trying to make his wife happy. When he asked if she wanted a Fitbit, she said having something that counted calories would be more useful. So he bought her a Fitbit.

But then he also went to his lab at GE and started tinkering with a calorie counting device. So far he’s built a prototype that measures the water, water and volume of food,. The current version is accurate within 5 percent to 10 percent of calories, but is a metal box you approach with safety goggles on, judging by the short video GE published.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnd7AKT5Upw&w=560&h=315]

The GE device may never make it to market, but the idea of building devices or imaging algorithms that can tell what people are eating is one that’s getting a lot of research attention. Thanks to fitness trackers, connected scales, blood pressure and heart monitors and even connected mattress pads, we know a lot about what’s happening in our bodies and our energy outputs, but inputs are still a mystery. If GE’s product ever makes it to market it will compete with ideas such as SRI’s photo-analysis of foods, TellSpec’s laser spectrometer and Consumer Physics’ handheld connected laser spectrometer.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of Gigaom.